The double standards
practised by the West over the Prophet Mohammad cartoons are nothing short
of hypocrisy. As commentator Rachard Itani points out: "Quickly now: what
defines a hypocrite? Answer: a person who follows the letter of the law,
but not its spirit. The laws against anti-semitism are just that: laws
against anti-semitism enacted by hypocritical Europeans with blood on
their hands from the genocides in their recent and distant past, and much
guilt to atone for in their hearts and minds." This is a reprint of an
article that was first published by CounterPunch.org. Click
here for the CounterPunch article.

In many European
countries, there are laws that will land in jail any person who
has the chutzpah to deny not only the historicity of the Jewish
holocaust, but also the method by which Jews were put to death
by the Nazis. In some of these countries, this prohibition goes
as far as prosecuting those who would claim or attempt to prove
that less than 6 million Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis. In
none of these countries are there similar laws that threaten people
with loss of freedom and wealth for denying that large percentages
of gypsies, gays, mentally retarded, and other miscellaneous "debris
of humanity" were also eliminated by the Jew-slaughtering Nazis.

Quickly now:
what defines a hypocrite? Answer: a person who follows the letter
of the law, but not its spirit. The laws against anti-semitism
are just that: laws against anti-semitism enacted by hypocritical
Europeans with blood on their hands from the genocides in their
recent and distant past, and much guilt to atone for in their
hearts and minds.

The spirit
of the law, which would extend this protection to Muslims as well,
if not indeed other religious groups, is nowhere to be found in
the Western legal code. You can curse the Prophet of the Muslims
at will and with total impunity. However, approach the holocaust
at your own risks and perils if you do not include in your discussion
the standard, ritualistic incantations about the six million Jewish
victims of the European Nazis. There is a word for this in the
English language: hypocrisy.

I used to
have a lot of respect for the Dutch, the Danes, and the Norwegians,
and still do. However, I cannot claim that this respect is not
more nuanced today. The coloring started when the Dutch, who are
invariably and automatically described as being amongst the most
"tolerant" people in the West, if not the world, proved that their
tolerance was little more than skin deep. Their reaction to the
murder of Theo Van Gogh was anything but driven by tolerance.
They behaved as a mob in reaction to the criminal, despicable
action of an extremist and murderer, by painting the whole Dutch
Muslim community with the same broad brush that Vincent Van Gogh
would have eschewed. They burnt Muslim schools and mosques. They
directed opprobrium at Muslims in their midst, calling on them
"to go home" though many had been born in the Netherlands. No
subtlety in the Dutch reaction. Just collective anti-semitism
which they directed not at the Jews, but at the Jews' cousins,
the Muslims.

Then the
Danes, who must have felt left out, decided to go the Dutch one
better: a Danish paper published cartoons that are no less offensive
to Muslims than anti-semitism is to Jews. The cartoons were described
by Danish politicians and the press as not provocation, but a
principled case of free speech, although many Danish and Scandinavian
newspaper editors are on record stating that they published the
cartoons as an act of defiance against "radical Islam." This is
akin to these ignorant morons recommending that the U.S. ought
to nuke Tehran because that would teach Iranian President Ahmadinejad
a lesson.

If
there was any doubt that this affair
is one of anti-Muslim bias
it was swept away by the statements of the Editor in Chief of
Die Welt,
the German magazine, who declared
that the right to publish the cartoons
was "at the very core of our culture"
and that Europeans cannot
"stop using our journalistic right of
freedom of expression within legal
boundaries." It's the "legal boundaries"
qualifier that gives the game away:
there are no legal boundaries in
Europe protecting Muslims from the same ignominies that the law
protects Jews from.

What free
speech are we talking about here? The law says thou shalt not
utilize or publish anti-semitic language or imagery. Consequently,
Danish (and other European) papers will refrain from doing so,
lest they fall foul of the law and offend Jewish sensitivities.
The law does not say: thou shalt not offend Muslims or use imagery
that may be deeply offensive to them. So Danish papers will not
refrain from doing so, in fact they will go out of their way to
offend Muslims both in Denmark and around the world, in the name
of "free speech."

And the Norwegians? Well, they just decided to follow the Danes
down perdition lane, all in the name of holy hypocrisy, so a Norwegian
paper also published the offending cartoons. The statement about
"confronting radical Islam" was in fact made by the Norwegian
editor of a newspaper that is described as a "Norwegian Christian
Paper." And now that other European papers and Magazines have
also followed suit, if there was any doubt that this affair is
one of anti-Muslim bias, it was swept away by the statements of
the Editor in Chief of Die Welt, the German magazine, who declared
that the right to publish the cartoons was "at the very core of
our culture" and that Europeans cannot "stop using our journalistic
right of freedom of expression within legal boundaries." It's
the "legal boundaries" qualifier that gives the game away: there
are no legal boundaries in Europe protecting Muslims from the
same ignominies that the law protects Jews from.

And what
further argument does Die Welt put forward to justify its "legal"
action? " It pointed out that "Syrian TV had depicted Jewish rabbis
as cannibals." You can imagine how helpful a similar argument
would hold up in a court of law: "But your honor, I only killed
one guy and raped two women: the other guy killed four and raped
10!" That a German editor-in-chief of a major German paper should
use the "legal" argument to justify offending the religious sensitivities
of Muslims, when that same "legal" framework would see him thrown
in jail faster than he could spell the word legal if he offended
the sensitivities of Jews, may be a testament at least of his
own deep-seated contempt for Muslims. That so many European papers
have now reprinted the offensive cartoons is an indication that
the contempt for Muslims does not stop with the editor-in-chief
of Die Welt.

This whole
affair is nothing but an over-reaction to a simple cartoon, you
say? Not if you remember a certain other cartoon that appeared
in the British newspaper, The Independent, on 27 January 2003.
It depicted Prime Minister Sharon of Israel eating the head of
a Palestinian child while saying: "What's wrong? You've never
seen a politician kissing babies before?" Jews in Britain and
around the world erupted with indignation, arguably because the
depiction reminded them of millennial charges levied against them
by Christians who accused them of using the blood of babies in
ritualistic killings.

You see, Sharon can actually kill, maim and spill the real, actual
blood of Palestinian babies: that is not offensive to Zionist
Jews and their apologists in the West. But let Sharon be depicted
in a cartoon metaphorically as the ogre that he has proved to
be in his real life, symbolically eating a Palestinian child,
and the world will erupt in offended indignation. A cartoon that
is offensive to Muslims, on the other hand, is depicted as nothing
but an expression of "free speech." There is a word for this in
any language: hypocrisy.

While
the spirit of the law is that
Europeans shalt not offend any ethnic
or religious groups including Muslims,
this seems to be lost only on the
Europeans themselves, or at least
the Danes, the Germans and their ilk
amongst them, who only care about,
or fear, the letter of the law.
Why should we therefore be shocked
when Muslims depict Europeans as
nothing but a bunch of hypocrites?

Before the
Danish cartoon incident started to evolve into a growing international
crisis, the Danish Prime Minister and the publisher of the Danish
newspaper that first published the offending cartoons both declared
that they would never apologize on grounds of free speech and
because publishing the cartoons had not broken any Danish laws.
(Yes, the "no law broken" argument again.) Yesterday, however,
they both ended up apologizing in the face of a growing tsunami
of protests on the part of Arab and Muslim governments, some of
whom withdrew their Ambassadors from Copenhagen.

The Danish prime minister did not apologize because his moral
compass suddenly found True North again. The real reason, of course,
is that he understood, though a tad too late, the potential economic
consequences of a widespread boycott of Danish goods on the part
of one billion people. There is a word for this in the Danish
language: realpolitik.

Muslims and
other reasoning people around the world understand well that European
laws against anti-Semitic speech, writing, and behavior, were
enacted for two reasons. The stated reason was to protect the
Jews from the continued onslaught of anti-Semitic attacks, both
verbal and physical, which culminated historically in the repeated
pogroms that Christian Europeans launched against Jews repeatedly
through the centuries. (Historically, it was the Arabs who protected
the Jews and took them in whenever they fled Christian barbarity,
especially in the Middle Ages.)

The real reason, of course, is to protect the Europeans from the
pangs of their own conscience, which has very good reason to feel
guilty indeed, given what Europeans did to Jews in the last millennium,
especially in the 19th and 20th centuries, not to mention what
they did to the indigenous people of the Caribbean and the Americas
since the 1600s, and to the people of Asia, Africa and Oceania
as well. I have long thought that it's European Christians, more
so than Jews, who ought to observe Yom Kippur, or adopt a similar
atonement observance of their own.

While the
spirit of the law is that Europeans shalt not offend any ethnic
or religious groups including Muslims, this seems to be lost only
on the Europeans themselves, or at least the Danes, the Germans
and their ilk amongst them, who only care about, or fear, the
letter of the law. Why should we therefore be shocked when Muslims
depict Europeans as nothing but a bunch of hypocrites? Why shouldn't
Governments of Muslim countries recall their Ambassadors to Denmark
in protest, as some did?

The only disappointment is that no Western or non-Muslim government,
the meek complaints to a French newspaper by the French Foreign
Office excepted, had the moral and ethical courage to publicly,
unequivocally and forcefully condemn an act that is as deeply
offensive to Muslims as the desecration of a Torah scroll, or
of a Jewish cemetery, is offensive to all civilized people in
the world, be they Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Animist,
or Atheist.

Muslims
deserve nothing more nor
less than for Christians in the U.S.
and Europe, and Zionist Jews in Israel,
to simply abide by the golden rule:
treat others as you would have others
treat you. So far, Christians and
Zionist Jews have proven that they
only abide by the alternative definition
of this rule: "They who have the gold,
make the rule."

There are
two ways for Europeans to redeem themselves: the immediate temptation
would be to call on their national parliaments to extend the protections
of the laws against anti-Semitism and Holocaust denying to Islam
and Muslims, as well as any other religious group . That would
be the wrong recommendation however. The right recommendation
would be to repeal the laws that govern holocaust denying and
other laws that favor one group over another, so that the issue
truly becomes one of free speech. And if Europeans are the civilized
people they claim to be, then their politicians and newspaper
publishers ought to find it easy to immediately apologize when
they have unwittingly offended the taboos of any human community,
be it religious or otherwise.

Muslims and
Arabs have suffered enough hypocrisy at the hands of European
Christians, just as Jews suffered in the past at the hands of
these same Europeans, and as Palestinian Muslims and Christians
alike are suffering today at the hands of Americans, Europeans
and, of course, Zionist Jews, both Sephardim and Ashkenazi. If
Europe thinks of itself as a civilized society, then it ought
to do its utmost to redress the wrongs that too many people around
the world have suffered as a result of European misbehavior and
often outright criminal actions, most especially since the 1400s.

Muslims deserve
nothing more nor less than for Christians in the U.S. and Europe,
and Zionist Jews in Israel, to simply abide by the golden rule:
treat others as you would have others treat you. So far, Christians
and Zionist Jews have proven that they only abide by the alternative
definition of this rule: "They who have the gold, make the rule."
The gold in this case is a combination of economic and military
might. Of this, Europeans, Zionist Jews and their American overlords
have aplenty in reserve. Were it that they also had an equal reserve
of un-hypocritical, civilized morality and ethical behavior to
underpin their feelings of sanctimonious superiority.

And the other
measure that Europeans can adopt to redeem themselves? The European
people can start by throwing out of office, and initiating criminal
proceedings against, any politician responsible for sending a
single soldier to invade, occupy, and initiate pogroms against
the people of Iraq: these politicians have been guilty of war
crimes and crimes against humanity, which makes them unfit for
the honors that continued office holding bestows upon them.

Europeans can also give the boot to any politician who has approved
or turned a blind eye to a single rendition flight that sent any
person to the torture chambers of the Americans or their surrogate
torturers in some Arab or Muslim countries. These are the same
countries whose religious sensitivities we should all respect
as strongly as we respect Jewish sensitivities when it comes to
the Jewish holocaust, not because the law says so, but because
it's the right thing to do. These are also the same countries
whose human rights trespasses Europeans ought to condemn as equally
and vehemently as they should condemn the continued human rights
abuses and state terrorism perpetrated by the Israeli government
in Palestine/Israel, and by some European governments in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and in other out-of-sight/out-of-mind places like
Haiti, Africa, and elsewhere.

In other
words, Europeans can start by applying the simple rule of one
weight and one measure to both friends and foes, equally to themselves
and to the rest of the world, because policy and politics, both
domestic and foreign, ought to be based upon and subject to principled
moral considerations, not expediency of the economic, financial
or religious kind.